Similar controversies erupted over the stories of Osiris (c. 25th century BC).

By the 10th century BC, almost all of the story themes that we ascribe to more modern authorship had already been written.

IIRC the current scholarly consensus is that the shared parts represent two surviving variants of an even earlier story that was widely told across cultures in that region.

For example, compare the following passages, describing how Noah / Utnapishtim let out birds to search for dry land, after their boats get grounded on a tall mountain.

Genesis 8:6-12:

After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth. Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. But the dove could find nowhere to perch because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.

Epic of Gilgamesh:

> When the seventh day dawned I loosed a dove and let her go. She flew away, but finding no resting-place she returned. Then I loosed a swallow, and she flew away but finding no resting-place she returned. I loosed a raven, she saw that the waters had retreated, she ate, she flew around, she cawed, and she did not come back.

Historically, much of Genesis was likely written during the Babylonian exile. It's not surprising at all that the authors of Genesis borrowed a story that was extremely well known in Babylon.

There were certainly earlier stories that were included in Genesis, but the actual writing occurred long after those stories supposedly took place.

> It's quote possible Gilgamesh was written down from their stories, rather than the other way around.

The Epic of Gilgamesh was written down long before there was even a Hebrew language. It's one of the most ancient written works.

At any rate both the Babylonians and the ancient Israelites were Semitic peoples, so obviously they had a shared background long before the Exile.

There are also many references in early Genesis that do suggest it originates in traditions much older, including references to great cities and powers that were long, long gone by the Exile. This actually sent me quite recently down some rabbit holes.

The Bible is not a single book. It's really a collection of different works, written over the course of centuries by different people. Different parts date from different eras (and then were subsequently edited over the centuries).

> we have direct archeological evidence in the form of dated, physical scrolls.

From what I know, only very short fragments of a few prayers survive from before the exile.

But the claim that any part of Genesis dates to the Exile is a weak historiographical claim, based primarily on a few pillars of very weak circumstantial evidence: a) we don’t have many physical examples dated to a prior time - but that’s not at all surprising; the vast supermajority of texts don’t survive, and many of the most ancient copies we do have are relatively recent discoveries; b) it makes sense to some people to argue this based on (reasonable) speculation about the development of the Jewish religion and the pressures at different periods of its development and c) as a corollary to b, one mainstream opinion is that Genesis can mostly be attributed to two different sources by a stylistic analysis and one of them is simply believed to date around the Exile.

This corresponds to the general current fads in historiography and history but it is by no means definite, and we shouldn’t be surprised if it is all overturned in a night by a single discovery, as these things very often are. This type of historiography is not really rigorous in a meaningful sense and is based essentially on current academic trends and a few authorities.

So we can safely consider the arguments underlying the dating ourselves without getting in too much trouble, but we don’t even have to do that to address your particular claim that the portions of Genesis must have been devised by an Exilic writer due to Babylonian influence. This essentially requires engaging in a deliberate pious fraud, which then was taken up by the other Israelites without question and who accepted the new stories with no recorded debate, and which also received no pushback when the Israelites who did not go into Exile. We would expect the possibility of diverging traditions on this point, but for example, the Samaritans have precisely the same story on this point, although the dating of that is also a point of contention. Either way, we should keep in mind that only some Israelites went into Exile, and plenty remained in Israel and Judah and maintained their traditions through the 70 year Exile.

It’s possible that this did happen. But it’s also the case that Babylonian contact was not new in the Exile period. The Israelites didn’t exist in a vacuum, they were part of the tapestry of the wider Semitic world for their entire existence and would have had familiarity with all these stories and beliefs the entire time. Indeed, it’s most commonly believed that the Israelite religion was not unique, but a simple development into monotheism from a normal localized Canaanite religion. And indeed, at some point, they all shared a common origin. Rather than adapting a Sumerian-via-Babylon story in a very late period, it’s a much more parsimonious explanation that some version of the story always existed amongst the Israelites in their oral tradition regardless of when it was committed to writing.

I don't see why this should be called a "pious fraud." Babylon was a massive cultural center of that time, and the land of Israel was a relative backwater on its periphery. Babylon would have exerted an enormous cultural influence on the surrounding peoples, including the Israelites.

Exactly as Romans and Greeks had basically the “same” stories, in most cases they were not copying from each other, they had the same source.

At any rate, as the example in your other comments shows, it doesn’t share the same “little details”, the little details are different.

> I don't see why this should be called a "pious fraud." Babylon was a massive cultural center of that time, and the land of Israel was a relative backwater on its periphery. Babylon would have exerted an enormous cultural influence on the surrounding peoples, including the Israelites.

Because you’re suggesting some Israelite in Babylon basically saw the stories and then inserted it into Genesis under different names, probably existing ones, and that everyone else just went along with it. That is, they all knew it was not part of their tradition and that some guy was just adding it in based on the Babylonian story but accepted the insertion anyway because…

> they would have been descendants of the same story originating from the proto-Semitic people they both came from.

The Epic of Gilgamesh predates Genesis by about 1500 years. The people who wrote Genesis would have known of the Epic of Gilgamesh. I do not find it convincing to hand-wave the identical details in the stories (like the story about beaching on a mountain and then releasing birds from the Ark to find dry land, until one doesn't return) as merely suggesting a common origin. Babylon was a superpower of the time, both politically and culturally. The Israelites were influenced by it.

Yes, as I said:

> Indeed, it’s most commonly believed that the Israelite religion was not unique, but a simple development into monotheism from a normal localized Canaanite religion.

Early Judaism was obviously polytheistic. The Flood story is almost certainly a story that dates back to those times, well before the Exile.

That said, by the Babylonian Exile, Judaism was clearly monotheistic and not "syncretic" (that's not how syncretism works anyway).

> The Epic of Gilgamesh predates Genesis by about 1500 years.

This is the issue. You're conflating the current academic consensus (very rough and subject to change) on the composition of Genesis with "when did the Genesis stories originate among the Israelites." Nobody thinks Genesis was written ex nihilo by some priests in Babylon and pressed on the rest of the Jewish population. (If nothing else, this would make post-Exile events totally untenable: how did they convince the non-Exile Jews of...anything?)

> The people who wrote Genesis would have known of the Epic of Gilgamesh. I do not find it convincing to hand-wave the identical details in the stories (like the story about beaching on a mountain and then releasing birds from the Ark to find dry land, until one doesn't return) as merely suggesting a common origin.

There's nothing handwavy about this. This is exactly how it works, in religions and myths across the world. Sometimes we've been able to trace it very clearly, as with Indo-Europeans. The more closely related the peoples, the more their stories match up. Two Semitic peoples in the same region having two near-identical stories without them having borrowed from one another is the least surprising thing in the world; oral tradition actually holds up pretty well in most cases (as documented in the original article.) This is in fact clearly supported by the theory of the composition of Genesis by multiple authors, with very slightly different narratives.

If you want to be more technical about the composition of Genesis, opinions vary, but the current consensus holds there were three or four main authors: the Yahwist, the Elohist, the Deuteronomist, and the Priest. The only one of these believed to date to the Exile is the Priest, with all the others predating it. The earliest source is believed to be the Yahwist, supposed to be writing in the 800s BC. Critically, much of the Flood story and the details about birds are specifically believed to originate with the Yahwist source before the Exile period.

> Babylon was a superpower of the time, both politically and culturally. The Israelites were influenced by it.

Yes, as I specifically said:

> It’s possible that this did happen. But it’s also the case that Babylonian contact was not new in the Exile period. The Israelites didn’t exist in a vacuum, they were part of the tapestry of the wider Semitic world for their entire existence and would have had familiarity with all these stories and beliefs the entire time.

Either way, all the Semitic versions of the Flood myth likely depend on a Sumerian original, along with the general influence of Sumerian myth on Semitic belief. (Personally, I have no problem with supposing that it was based on some real event and then the tale grew in the telling, just as Gilgamesh was a real king.) It's of course conceivable that before the Exile the Canaanites and the Babylonians crosschecked each other's versions, but it's not at all necessary. There was never any reason for "late" contamination of the story by Babylonians; the pan-Semitic influence always existed, and whoever the proto-Israelites were, obviously they were wandering around somewhere concurrently with the other Semitic peoples.

At any rate, the Babylonians were very definitely on the downslope during the Exile period, as evidence by their permanent fall from notability after their conquest by the Persians at the end of it. They and Egypt were the two regional powers Judah was stuck between at the time. Israel, of course, was earlier destroyed by the Assyrians, who had been a definite superpower but saw their glory days end with Nineveh.

While it's commonly used as an explanation for the prevalence of flood myths throughout the world, I just don't buy it. That level of sea level rise just isn't going to come across as world-ending flood; it's going to be noticeable over time, but even sedentary cultures along the coastlines who are the most impacted by the rise are going to easily capable of dealing with it.

To me, the more parsimonious explanation is... it's just extending the metaphor of a flash flood. There's already a pretty consistent metaphor of ritual cleansing among multiple cultures. Flash floods are pretty common in many climates, and especially in an alluvial flood plain, the utter devastation of a major flood is readily apparent. Combine the two of them with a metaphorical story of the world being so wrong that everybody needs to be swept away and... why not use a flood to explain the destruction of the entire world? What other disaster would you choose instead?

I'm entirely open to being skeptical about meltwater pulse 1A being responsible for the universal flood myth, but I don't agree with this refutation.

Many of our stories do not exist to relate literal events, they exist to explain natural phenomenons. And there are many ways for humans to frame these explanations, but for whatever reason the human brain seems hardwired to prefer stories, so the explanations that survived to be transmitted through the ages were the ones that happened to take the form of stories.

So rather than saying "the pulse event wasn't rapid enough, therefore it can't explain the story" is IMO too hasty. Consider a sedentary people living on the coast, where a child asks her grandmother where their ancestors are buried, to which the grandmother responds by gesturing out at the Persian Gulf where, 60 miles from shore, their village once clung to the coast 500 years ago. It only takes one curious child asking "why?" and one bored grandmother willing to come up with a story to get the ball rolling on a tale that still gets told 10,000 years later (a tale that, indeed, would likely also have been informed by the experience of annual river flooding).

We lack the collective self consciousness to see ourselves through the eyes of the people of other times, thinking through what it means to be understood through artifact, and the distortions it produces.

The closest we come is prophesying that future generations will blame us for the destruction of the natural world and climate of earth. That is a thin mask for our age's narcissistic fixation with producing myths of its own apocalyptic world-ending power.

The people of the future probably won't think of us as bad, evil doers, that destroyed the natural world for future generations with no care but for ourselves and our consumption, if they are anything like us, they will more likely think of us as having one hand digging for gold where the sun don't shine while the other stuffs hot, fresh cheeseburgers into mouth, unibrow freshly dripping with sweat.

My guess though is it's probably a plot device where the storyteller takes a known phenomenon and just exaggerates it to magical-mythical proportions, which may contribute to the story being repeated as it strikes the balance between the relatability of the real phenomenon and the attention-grabbing otherworldliness of its exaggerated version.

For that reason, I think an event completely different from the yearly flooding is more likely, for example the Minoan eruption or Black Sea deluge hypothesis.

But the one that is most intriguing IMHO is the mediterranean sea event that happened but it is 6M years ago. Could ancestors of genus Homo have passed that story long for all that time even across speciation???

https://www.uu.nl/en/news/first-direct-proof-of-mega-flood-i...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothe...

“Although initially sceptical, Wallace Broecker—the scientist who proposed the conveyor shutdown hypothesis—eventually agreed with the idea of an extraterrestrial impact at the Younger Dryas boundary, and thought that it had acted as a trigger on top of a system that was already approaching instability.”

Did he, though? There is archeological and contemporary written historical evidence of an actual Gilgamesh. Not so with Abraham.

The Abrahamic tradition was orally transmitted by a people who for generations lived in Babylonian captivity (1300 years after the earliest surviving copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Old Balylonian, with the earliest partial texts appearing 1600 years before), and was finally written down 3 generations after they left Babylon.

Few hundred years later they give him a magic sword and a round table. Same idea, but with other cultures, religions, etc.

If you simply consider how the human mind works, this "should" be fairly obvious. But one's ability or likelihood to think about such things is once again a function of the norms and accepted practices of one's ideology. That which is not known of, essentially does not exist.

An adherent of an ideology might, like, have rituals. But the ideology isn't the rituals.

Here are some ideologies off the top of my head: democracy, marxism, environmentalism, libertarianism, atheism, the moral basis of Christianity but not the religion itself, utitarianism, humanism, empiricism.

None of those have, as far as I can tell, a single ritual inherently associated with them.

(You'll also have a hard time enumerating those concepts in a complete and consistent way)

But if you're even a wee bit of a subjectivist, as many (not all) social scientists and social philosphers are, then a definition like that isn't interesting or productive. From that perspective, ideologies are something that people profess adherence to and express statements about and behave in self-identified accordance to.

They gather in elections, they discuss power through the lens of capital and labor, they recycle or avoid eating meat, they recoil at government overreach, they expose fraud in purported miralces, they pray, they trade trolley problem memes unironically, they protest against inequality, etc

If these don't make sense to you as "rituals of ideologies" for people doing cross-cultural studies, that's fine, but then I have a sense that a lot of cross-cultural studies just feels like hogwash to you anyway. I doubt I could change your mind here. :)

(nor would I call any of those rituals, either, but I guess words don't mean what they normally mean in those fields)

If you earnestly wished to "see the point", you're tripping yourself with by taking for granted "what it means to everyone else.." and things like "living in idea space"

There are traditions of study/thought that use ideology the way you mean, and traditions that don't. The variety of use is well-represented and has been since the word came into use. Likewise, "idea space" is a specific concept that some people accept as sensible and others don't. Again, the variety of relationships to it is well-represented (and stretches back millennia, on that one).

You can actually see an example of this kind of differing-perspectives-in-wide-use in the way use used "the moral basis of Christianity but not the religion itself" in your own comment above. While Platonic ideas predate Christianity and have much influence on its shape and study in the West, the that statement would strike most traditional and many modern Christian thinkers as non-sensical. To them, there is no sensible separation of Christianity's "moral basis" from its Church/people and trying to make some distinction is as alien and "pointless" to them as different senses of ideology are to you.

And yet, of course it's interesting to think about Christianity's "moral basis" as an ideology existing in "idea space" because it lets you relate that part of Christianity to other things that you feel are comparable using techniques that you know how to work with and have confidence in. That's pretty much exactly what's going on with social scientists/philosophers who think about ideology in the way I've been describing above.

Interestingly, how to (or if we even should!) resolve such issues in our (use of) language is itself a highly ideological matter.

Some, but not all of those rituals even stand up to basic scrutiny. Others, not so much.

Like, at its core, all it says is that there's one god, and he was his own kid, who died, and there's an afterlife, and you should live well.

Yet, I don't think you'd say that Christianity doesn't have rituals, even if no particular instantiation of it has the same rituals as any other one.